Hello hello! We're halfway through the year, I've been reading up a storm,and I promised readingtheend that I would revisit my reading goals aroundthis time of year to check that they were still feasible and I still want to do them.

As a reminder, my goals were:

Read 150 books, of which 50 have to be prose

Read stories by 75 new-to-me female authors

#getouttamydamnhouse: stop having 90 library books in yourhouse, Susan, what are you doing

#unofficialqueerasfuckbookclub: Have more than 25% of my reading focuson queer stories

I'll be going from the full figures that I've been tracking, which isdifferent from what's on the end of my last Eight Book Minimum post, and differentfrom what's in my GoodReads challenge because that tracks rereads, whichI'm not doing here.

I honestly though that I was doing terribly at all of my goals so far, sothis exercise has been really useful for me to see what I'm doing and fixthe ones that haven't gone to plan. (Eighty books. How.)Thank you for the suggestion Jenny!

But how is everyone else doing? Completed any reading goals? Reconsidered any?

Eight Book Minimum: This edition brought to you by Fangirl Happy Hour.

Some of you may know that I do the transcripts for renay and booksmugglers's podcast, Fangirl Happy Hour. This is where it really starts to show up in my reading. It turns out that if I read the books they're gonna be talking about, I know how to spell everyone's names! And don't get spoiled, but no, seriously, being able to spell all of the character names is my favourite thing and makes everything infinitely less stressful, 10/10 would recommend.

... Of course, now renay can use her powers for evil to get me to read all the stuff she's recced to me over the years, but no one tell her that.

By which I mean hi everyone, it's been a while. But I'm back, I have been pouring media into my face pretty solidly since you last saw me so I am ready to start yelling and keep yelling for a good long while!

(Q: Susan, how many books?A: Look, I'm not saying that I'm on track to crack 150 books by August, I'm just saying 98 books is a completely reasonable number of books to have read by mid-March.)

In that spirit, welcome to all of this yelling. Housekeeping: I'd like to give the most grateful shout out to renay for getting my shit together for me with the images! She is a star! And I also wanna remind everyone that the asterisk in the list below is a marker for sexual assault/rape, so look after yourselves, okay?

I have read SO MUCH prose this time around! Honestly, I forgot how long it takes, it feels like I spent forever with the same books, even if GoodReads tells me it was only a couple of days with each. People who read prose exclusively: how do you do this all the time?! Are you all wizards?!

(ALSO I am bringing back "*" on the book list as a marker for "This book contains rape/discussion of rape," so please bear that in mind and look after yourselves, okay?)

I feel like it says a lot about me as a person that I go "Okay, I will read lots of prose books by new authors" and promptly start on three massive manga re-read projects. And also that I swap between Important Seminal Manga That Is Critically Beloved and the Sparkly Shipbait Idfic. START AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON, I GUESS.

I have also spotted the slight flaw in my #getouttamydamnhouse goal, which that I hadn't accounted for what I was going to do when I... Happened to the library? Having a target that keeps going up incrementally is a good way to discourage yourself, so I am keeping my goal fixed at ninety (oh god past!me what were you doing) and when I get to June I'm gonna count up how many library books I have left in my house and adjust my goal accordingly.

Hello my darlings, happy new year! We made it, and I'm so proud of us! ♥ I figured I'd start off the new year by clearing the decks from last year, so this post is going to be talking about my goals from last year and for this year, along with some of the books that I didn't actually get around to in 2016. (Shout out to renayfor that one!) If you just want to hear me yelling about books, I'll be back in a fortnight with the first batch, so I'll see you then! ;)

Okay, that's all of it! *keels over* I think I'm ready for 2017 and a whirlwind frenzy of consuming media now, I don't know about the rest of you! What are you all thinking of for goals this year? Did any of you have books you meant to get to last year?

Currently Reading

Revenge by Yoko Ogawa (It's a short story collection, and I've only read the first story in it, but so far it's been very precise and unsettling, in a good way.)

Reading Challenges

Books read so far: 107/150 (9 new this post)New-to-me female creators: 60/100 (16 new this post.)#unofficialqueerasfuckbookclub: 38/107 (5 new this post: I Love This Part, First Impressions, Monstress, The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For, Fresh Romance.) (I forgot that I'd been initially tracking this as a running tally, and now I have gone back to doing that because it... Might be a more useful marker? A bit late in the year to realise, but it's good to bear in mind for next year... And also to stop me feeling smug, because that number is way lower than I thought!)

Part of my brain keeps being like "It's all graphic novels and manga and trade paperbacks, those don't count!" and I keep having to remind myself that yes they do. They are real books and it's still an achievement! ... That said though, oh man, there is so much prose in my future.

This week though, my continuing adventures in BL manga. As a reminder from last time: anything in the list with an asterisk next to it contains actual or attempted non-consensual/dubiously consensual sex, the jump tags SHOULD let you navigate around if you want to avoid those.

Reading Goals

Books read so far: 86/150 (9 new this post; this number is officially just being the number of things I've talked about now, I think.)New-to-me female creators: 40/100 (2 new this post.)#unofficialqueerasfuckbookclub: 8! Full house!

OKAY, GUYS, WE NEED TO TALK. I mentioned this before, but I accidentally blew a day off doing nothing but reading like twenty volumes of BL manga. And quite frankly, I love all y'all, but I do not have time to review twenty volumes of anything for one post. So, here's what we're doing: for the next month or so, posts are going to keep going until we end up with either eight books or 3000-3500 words, whichever comes second. Does this sound fair?

(This does mean that I'm now running enough books to have a five-post lead on myself, in theory, so hopefully things are gonna be a little more regular from here on out!)

Also, just for the purposes of the Accidental Month of BL, ANYTHING IN THE LIST WITH AN ASTERISK NEXT TO IT COMES WITH A TRIGGER WARNING FOR ATTEMPTED OR ACTUAL NON-CONSENSUAL/DUBIOUSLY CONSENSUAL SEX. I'm sticking navigation links in as well so you can just read the ones that interest you. Let me know if that works for people so I've got a chance to change it up for next time?

Reading Goals

Books read so far: 77/150 (8 new this post -- also it's really weird coming back to this number, because my GR count is like 113 now.)New-to-me female creators: 38/100 (8 new this post)#unofficialqueerasfuckbookclub count: 8! YES! THIS IS WHAT I AM AFTER! *does a dance*

(For those wondering, the word count came to about 3700. Apparently I have thoughts on yaoi.)

I'm starting to think that this column might actually be good for me. If I'm left to my own devices, I tend to forget to actually make time for books, I prioritise writing and fanfic over anything else, and then I burn out like a bastard because I forget that you need to consume good media to produce good media. Writing this is giving me a solid reason to actually make the time, which I probably wouldn't do otherwise.

(Also I'm noticing a pattern of "If I can put your book down long enough to go to sleep, I'm probably not going to pick it up again." WHY BRAIN, THIS IS A TERRIBLE HABIT TO GET INTO, STOP THAT.)

I accidentally got out a boat-load of comic trades from my library to fill in a reading gap – I wanted something sort and simple that I'd be able to read quickly! And I was planning to talk about how writing this column really encouraged me to, y'know, actually make that time, to find things that I could read as discuss no matter how busy I was doing other things!

... That may or may not have been a couple of days before Captain America #1 dropped, and before the spoilers about Civil War II surfaced, and... And I looked at the stack of comics I'd just read and went "Do I really want to give Marvel my words this week? Really?"

I didn't, quite frankly. I was tired and angry and tired of being angry -- but the comics I read this week were creators who had nothing to do with the shitshow, or the characters Marvel hasn't done badly by! Not talking about them wouldn't affect the problem at all! So if I sound tired and impatient with some of these? I REALLY WAS.

(For bonus points this week: I have been literally up to my elbows in comics because I'm in charge of culling our selection! I have seen lots that I want to read! Sure would be nice if mainstream comics loved me as much as I love them!)

Well, this sure is a mixed bag of things I read in the last month! I'm not sure how I ended up doing this weird mix of genres, mediums, age-ratings and degrees of... Let's go with quality, rather than consent, shall we? But I think I had a pretty good run of it all told, despite the fact that at least one of these books nearly got launched across a room at one point.

Fair warning: this week I lured myself into books through a lot of terrible romance novels (two regency, one suspense, and one fantasy), which means that there are some... Very Disappointed reactions here.

Q: Susan, where have you and your book column been?!A: ... Y'know what, I don't even KNOW. I may have fallen into a black hole made of the same like, three fic for the entirety of March, because that's about all I remember?

... Seriously, I would like to discuss the awesome media I've been consuming but I don't think I've read anything for like a month. So... This is me trying to get back into the swing of things?

This week's post was going to be a good and sensible post! It was going to contain completely reasonable amounts of books! And then I ended up travelling over 500 miles with my spousal unit as we hokey-kokeyed up and down the Welsh border for three days, so I had plenty of time to clear out my Comixology backlog. Especially as Storm Imogen made all of this, y'know, fun!

(Hay-on-Wye is AWESOME, guys, it has like thirty-eight bookshops in one village. We didn't get to linger because we were worried about the road back flooding, but it is SO GREAT.)

... What I'm saying is that I'm seriously considering giving up as a prose reader, it's clearly not working out. I'm sorry prose! It's not you, it's me!

This fortnight I have seriously failed out of reading prose, but have done quite well on manga and graphic novels! I do have a stack of crime novels and queer lit about three feet high to get through (I will measure it if I have to), including like eight J. D. Robb books, so I need to crack on through that.

Before I do, though – internet! I have a request! Do you have any recommendations for women-centric stories set in Ancient Greece and/or the Roman Empire? I have Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin,Daughters of Rome by Kate Quinn, and I've got Lindsey Davis' The Ides of April on order... I'm just not sure where to go from here. A lot of the stuff I can lay my hands on is focused on male characters, and quite frankly that's not what I want from fiction about the ancient world. Can anyone give recommendations?